Literacy with an Attitude

 

For my service learning project, I tutor 3rd and 4th grade students in a Providence school in math. This week however, I actually had the opportunity to sit down and talk with my placement teacher about literacy. I am in ELL/ESL classrooms,  and until this week this was unbeknownst to me. I have had the opportunity to sit down and work with many of the students who all seem to have a pretty good grasp on the language. However, their reading scores are remarkably below bench mark. I had the chance to look at my 3rd grade teacher's progress monitoring chart. The students are tracked according to color with green being proficient, yellow being average, and reds being the lowest performing. The standard third grade student is expected to read between 70-100 wpm (words per minute). More than half of the students in this class were reds reading between 3 to 10 words per minute. This took me back, I couldn't believe what my eyes were seeing and I was terribly saddened. More than half of those third grade students were reading at below a kindergarten level, and because of great government programs like No Child Left Behind, they just keep getting pushed through the system landing them where they are today :) The Rhode Island Department of Education identifies low performing schools as Priority, Focus, or Warning schools. Depending on how poorly the school ranks determines the level of monitoring and intervention done by the state.  If you look at the website, all of the lowest performing schools are located in Providence, East Providence, Pawtucket, and Central Falls. These cities of low achieving schools are also among some of the poorest cities on the state. Coincidence? No Child Left Behind is an oxymoron. Maybe we are physically carrying our students to the next level. But are we really sending them off as capable as they possibly can be? My placement teacher disclosed to me that she has to fight tooth and nail to get her students the assistance they need. We are failing our students. The children are our future. We need to invest more time into them. We need to make sure we are doing everything in our power to bring them up as capable human beings. We need to advocate for them, but we also need to make sure they are given the opportunity to adequately communicate their voice.